


The Past is in the Past

by Boostergoldsmissingarm



Series: Earth-Boost [5]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Everyone had an emo phase, Unexpected teaching moments, blackmailing, if you hate me just know that I am me and that's a lot worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 17:02:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13956081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boostergoldsmissingarm/pseuds/Boostergoldsmissingarm
Summary: Stephanie discovers yet another dark secret from Bruce's past





	The Past is in the Past

For the first time in approximately forever years crime in Gotham was slow. Stephanie had been walking the halls of Wayne Manor bored out of her mind for like half a day. Four hours. An hour. Forty five minutes, but it felt like a lot.

She had gone there looking for someone to hang out with, but Tim was doing Wayne Enterprises stuff, Cass was traveling the world doing ninja stuff, and she didn’t really know where everyone else was. Probably blowing up something or other. It’s just what they were good at.

She walked down the the 100th random hall, trailing her fingers along the side. She was pretty sure she was lost at this point. She didn’t even know why she had gone there in the first place.

She sat down next to a huge clock. What was with this house and huge clocks? How many clocks does one house need? At some point they had to get impractical. What rich asshole looked at his house and thought oh yes what this really needs is another big ass clock.

Steph checked her phone for any messages from anyone. There wasn’t any. It was 3:00 so too late for lunch and too early for dinner. Today was the worst.

She stood up, dusted off her ass, and continued walking. On a whim she opened a random door. She expected old furniture covered in sheets which never made any sense to her because why cover the furniture. Use it or give away. Rich people made her angry a lot.

It was not a room of ghost furniture, it was full of childhood objects. It ranged from a kid’s toy train to heavy metal band posters. Also a strangely large amount of Gray Ghost memorabilia so she was pretty sure this was Bruce’s stuff. Maybe she would find his feelings locked up somewhere.

She poked around for a while and she found: $200 just laying around, a framed picture of George Washington, some manga about an animatronic bees, and a dinosaur stuffed animal. She was just about to leave when she found something in the drawer she was rummaging through.

“Woah, what the shit is this,” she said to no one in particular but also to God because what the shit. Her brain literally could not comprehend what she was seeing. It was terrible, cliche, teen angst poetry. Pages and pages of it. Each and everyone was a unique form of bad ranging from musings on love to the dark inevitably of death. None were signed, but she knew who wrote them. And she was going to blackmail him so hard.

———fanfiction.net style line break———

Bruce was tired. It had been a long day of faking drunken debauchery and he wanted to relax. He walked into his office to finish signing some papers when a voice came from his chair.

“The dark is inside

In every bone

I think of life

I start to groan”

“Stephanie what the hell,” said Bruce, with all the exhaustion of a man that had been dealing this shit for years.

“What, you don’t recognize it? Think back to, I’m guessing, teenage years. You know those dark times of angst and hormones. You only ever grew out of the hormone part though” said Stephanie, more smug than any human being or alien had the right to be.

In a flash he recognized it. His old high school poetry phase. He had painted his nails black, wallowed in misery, and thought himself above everyone else. Good thing he had changed completely.

“What do you want?” he asked. He could do this. He dealt with professional criminals all the time. They tried to murder him. He could do this.

“I don't… really know.”

“That’s not how blackmail works Stephanie.”

“Don’t try to turn this into a teaching moment I’m blackmailing you.”

“Apparently not.”

“Do you want these poems to be shown to Jason? To Clark? To Hal Jordan?.”

“You wouldn’t dare.” That was crossing the line and she knew it.

“Maybe not Jordan. That’s crossing a line.”

“Well then what do you want?” he was tired. When will he be allowed to sleep.

“I want money?,” she said.

“I give you money all the time. I gave you money last week without you blackmailing me,” said Bruce.

“I want you to admit you were wrong abou-”

“I would rather die first,” said Bruce.

“You don’t know what I was going to say,” said Stephanie.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bruce. There are hills he would die on and that's all hills. He really needed to work on his stubbornness problem. He was torn between the fact that he was going to collapse and the fact that if those poems ever got out he would have to fake his own death and only so many people would believe that. She might not ever get tired though. She was basically his kid and they all thrived on spite.

“Well how about this,” she said and then went into a long explanation of something that was just a little less embarrassing than the poetry that he would almost never do if not for the fact that the poetry had phrases like “her icy blue hot beauty” and “my soul is an endless pit of despair, try to hurt me see if I care”.

“Do you need a little more motivation? Because I personally think people would love the one where you talk about how an angel came down from the heavens to personally slap you in the heart," she said. And with that she won.

He reluctantly agreed and that’s the story of how Batman went to several children’s birthday parties dressed in a princess dress talking about the magic of believing in yourself.

Stephanie released the poetry less than a month later and he did in fact fake his death, but a part of him actually died when Hal Jordan looked him in the eyes and quoted his poem about how spaghetti is a metaphor for life.


End file.
